1.4 Structure of the grammar and basic grammatical featuresfeatures
1.4.2 A quick guide to decoding glossed examples
In this section, I provide a brief overview of the main grammatical features in Gyeli in order to help the reader decode high-frequency elements in the glosses of example sentences.
Glossed examples are usually comprised of four lines, distinguishing the sur-face form on the word level in the first line and morpheme breaks in the second line, which provide important information on the underlying tonal patterns. Ev-ery vowel is marked for its surface tone in the first transcription line. In the
second line, some vowels have no tone marking, indicating that they are phono-logically toneless.
In terms of transcription conventions, I follow a typical Bantu notation com-bined with local orthographic conventions. Only in Chapter 2 do I use IPA ventions. I list the differences between IPA notation and Gyeli transcription con-ventions in Table 1.3.
Table 1.3: Notation differences between IPA and Gyeli orthography
IPA Gyeli orthography
palatal nasal /ɲ/ ny
velar nasal /ŋ/ n
palatal glide /j/ y
voiced affricate /dʒ/ j
voiceless affricate /tʃ/ ts
glottal stop /ʔ/ ’
Velar nasals are virtually everywhere homorganic and precede a velar plo-sive. There is just one exception where the velar nasal precedes /w/ in the noun ŋwándɔ́‘manioc stick’. In this instance, I use the IPA version to mark the differ-ence.
Gyeli has a basic SVO word order, as shown in (1)-(5).
(1) [Màmbì]S Màmbì
∅1.pn [à
a 1.pst1
dé]V dè-H eat-r
[mántúà]O H-ma-ntúà
obj.link-ma6-mango
‘Mambi ate mangoes.’
The verb stem is generally preceded by a “stamp” (subject-tense-aspect-mood-polarity) clitic, which encodes information about the subject person and gender agreement, tense, aspect, mood, and polarity, as seen in (1)-(5) withà,mɛ́, andbá, respectively. While eastern and southern Bantu languages are known for their rich agglutinative morphology, often with distinct -CV- prefixes for each of these categories, Gyeli as a northwestern Bantu language displays restrictions in seg-mental morphemes preceding the verb stem. Conversely, Gyeli has a rich tonal morphology where the tonal combinations on the stamp clitic and the verb stem yield different tense-aspect-mood categories, as discussed in Chapter 6. H tones attaching to the right of the verb stem, as expressed by -h in the second line, en-code the two past tenses (pst1 and pst2) in some environments or a realis mood
in other environments. The realis mood is pervasive in example sentences and glossed as -r, as seen in (1) through (5).
The subject can be dropped with the subject reference only encoded through agreement of the stamp clitic, as in (2).
(2) [à
The subject is rarely expressed by a pronoun. Subject pronouns (see §3.6.1) are glossed as sbj to clearly distinguish them from the stamp clitic, especially as most subject pronouns are segmentally identical to the stamp clitic of their agreement class. The use of subject pronouns as in (3) usually serves information structure purposes, often indicating switch-reference through the pronoun’s combination with the contrastive marker -gà(§4.1.2.4).
(3) [nyɛ̀gà]S
‘As for her/him, s/he ate mangoes.’
In addition to the H tones that attach to the right of the verb stem, expressing tense and mood categories, Gyeli has a pervasive syntactic H tone. It surfaces on phonologically toneless noun class prefixes of the object that immediately follows the verb, as in (3). This syntactic H tone is glossed as obj.link and further discussed in §7.2.1.2.
Most nominal modifiers, including relative clauses, follow the noun, as illus-trated in (4)-(5).
‘I cut this bread with my knife.’
(5) bá
‘They understand the language that you speak.’
The glossing of nouns deserves a detailed explanation. Each noun form be-longs to an agreement class; Gyeli has nine agreement classes and six genders, as described in Chapter 5. Agreement classes are established on the basis of agree-ment patterns reflected on dependent agreeagree-ment targets which include, in Gyeli, the stamp clitic, subject, object, and possessor pronouns, some nominal modi-fiers, e.g. some numerals and other quantimodi-fiers, demonstratives, and attributive markers. The agreement class that a noun controls on its dependent targets is glossed with a digit from 1 through 9 preceding the noun stem, for instance nt-fúmò ‘knife’ in (4) is glossed as ‘∅3.knife’ as this noun triggers agreement in agreement class 3.
The agreement class digit itself is preceded by an indication of the noun prefix class, in the case ofntfúmòa zero morpheme which is glossed as ‘∅’. Tradition-ally, many Bantu studies collapsed the concept of agreement and noun classes, assuming that each agreement class is more or less overtly marked by a nominal prefix. There is a rising awareness, however, that the noun prefixes do not neces-sarily match specific agreement classes (see, for instance, Güldemann & Fiedler 2019). In order to keep agreement classes and noun prefix classes distinct, I mark noun forms for both their noun prefix and their agreement class. In contrast to agreement class notation with a digit, noun prefix classes are represented by let-ters that indicate the shape of the prefix. This is straightforward for CV noun class prefixes, as shown in Table 1.4, as each CV prefix maps onto one agreement class.
The noun prefix classes “N” and “∅”, however, map onto several agreement classes, as shown in the lower part of Table 1.4. The capital “N” is a typical Bantu notation for nasal prefixes and covers all homorganic nasals /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/, which are allophones whose shape is determined by the following consonant.
Nasal noun prefixes occur in agreement classes 1 and 3. The noun prefix class that is characterized by a zero-prefix occurs in agreement classes 1, 3, 7, and 9 with exceptional occurrences in agreement class 8 as well.
It is important to note that both person and agreement classes are represented by digits, following Bantuist tradition. Agreement of speech-act-participants (1st and 2nd person) is marked for gender and number: 1sg, 1pl, 2sg, 2pl. In contrast, non-speech-act-participants, i.e. third person, are only marked for their agree-ment class with digits from 1 through 9, while number agreeagree-ment is inherent to each agreement class, as described in §5.2.
There are a few high-frequency elements in glosses that are worth mentioning for the reader’s convenience. One of them is the attributive marker (§3.8.3.2), comparable to English ‘of’, which serves as a linker between a noun and another
Table 1.4: Glossing of Gyeli nouns
“ba” 2 ba-jíbí ba2-thief ‘thieves’
“mi” 4 mi-mpá mi4-island ‘islands’
“le” 5 le-nángá le5-star ‘star’
“ma” 6 ma-nángá ma6-star ‘stars’
“be” 8 be-nyàgà be8-cow ‘cows’
“N” 1 m-ùdì N1-person ‘person’
3 n-vɛ̀wɔ̀ N3-breath ‘breath’
noun, pronoun, or demonstrative. It is glossed with att and is preceded by the agreement class marking, as in (6).
(6) mìmgbísì
‘the freshness of the oranges’
The attributive marker also serves as optional marker for relative clauses, as shown in (7).
‘Give me only your child that you have here.’
(7) also illustrates the glossing for demonstratives which represents its two paradigms based on distance: one for proximal (dem.prox) vs. distal (dem.dist).
The prepositionsɛ́, marking location, and the comitativenàalso appear fre-quently in glosses. The locativeɛ́often precedes other locative adverbs, as in (8).
See §3.10.1.1 for more information.
(8) ɛ́
‘I will build a real house over there.’
The comitative markerná expresses association in the nominal domain and can be translated both as ‘and’ and ‘with’, as shown in (9).
(9) bá
The comitative is found in a range of adjuncts, for instance in an instrumen-tal contexts as in (4) above. More information about the comitative marker is provided in §3.10.1.2.
Finally, there are many instances of code-switching in the examples that stem from natural texts. These are marked by indicating the source language in square brackets in the gloss line, as in (10).
(10) yí
‘That disturbs, but I greet you.’
Typical source languages for code-switching include Kwasio, Bulu, and French.
In this chapter, I outline the sound patterns of Gyeli including segmental and tonal phonology. The phonological description is complemented by some basic phonetic information. My account of Gyeli phonology is largely theory-neutral.
In the tonology section, I use autosegmental phonology for convenience of ex-plaining tonal rules.
For phonological and phonetic transcription in this chapter, I use IPA sym-bols. Phonetic transcriptions are marked by square brackets [] while phonemic representations are marked by slashes / /. Throughout the other chapters of this grammar as well as in glossed examples I use an orthography that combines typ-ical Bantu notation with local orthographic conventions. Gyeli does not have an official orthography but there are non-standardized conventions among the languages of the area which are, to a certain degree, influenced by French. For instance, the female proper nameNandtoungouis spelled in the French tradition, using 〈ou〉 to represent the vowel /u/. At the same time, the co-occurrence of a voiced and voiceless plosive 〈dt〉 stems from Kwasio orthography and is not typ-ically Bantu. Even though most of the Gyeli speakers are illiterate at the time of writing this grammar, their literacy will certainly increase over the next decades.
At the same time, more literate Bantu neighbors such as the Mabi, prefer a lo-cal Bantu orthography which will facilitate the use of this grammar for Gyeli speakers at a later point, given that the Bagyeli are mostly taught by teachers of surrounding Bantu groups.
The main differences between phonological transcription and local Bantu or-thography concerns IPA symbols that are not easily produced on electronic de-vices such as computer keyboards and smartphones. A summary of the differ-ences between IPA and Gyeli orthographic conventions were listed in §1.4.2.
As described in §2.4 of this chapter, Gyeli is a tonal language. I indicate tone according to the Africanist tradition with accent marks, an acute accent [ ́] rep-resenting a high (H) tone and a grave accent [ ̀] reprep-resenting a low (L) tone.
If a syllable is not represented with any tonal marking, this indicates that it is toneless. In glossed examples, the first line represents the surface form, show-ing phonetic tone. Thus, even toneless syllables will be marked for their surface
tone here. The second line represents the underlying phonological form where toneless syllables are represented without tonal marking.
I mark English translations of minimal pairs for their part of speech if there is an ambiguity between nouns and verbs. Verbs may further be specified for their valency: intransitive verbs are abbreviated with “v.i.” and transitive verbs with “v.t.” Gyeli verbs with two and three syllables are easily distinguishable from nouns as only their first syllable is specified tonally, while second and third syllables are toneless and therefore unmarked, as discussed in §2.4. Generally, tones are marked on vowels, while nasal vowels are transcribed with a tilde 〈~〉
between the vowel and the tone mark (§2.2).
In this chapter, I first describe the autosegmental phonology of Gyeli, includ-ing the consonant and vowel inventory, complemented by realization rules and phonotactics. In the third part, I describe the syllable structures of Gyeli nouns and verbs before I turn to tonology. This last section contains the tone inventory as well as tonal distribution and rules. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the place of Gyeli phonology within Bantu A80 languages.
2.1 Consonants
Gyeli segmental phonology features many typical characteristics that one would expect for a Bantu languages, but there is also a certain degree of variation, as will become clear in this chapter. Gyeli has, in comparison with Proto-Bantu, retained a fairly simple vowel system with the same number of distinctions, namely seven, but with some featural changes (see §2.2).
Concerning the consonant system, the Gyeli system seems more complex than the Proto-Bantu one. According to Hyman (2003: 42), who cites Meeussen (1967), Proto-Bantu only had eleven consonantal phonemes including a series of voice-less stops *p, *t, *k and voiced stops *b, *d, *ɡ.1*c and *j can, as Hyman (2003) points out, be interpreted as either affricates or palatal stops. Finally, PB had a series of nasals *m, *n, *ɲ. In addition to these Proto-Bantu sounds, Gyeli has developed a series of fricatives and semi-vowels, as I will describe in detail in the following.
In this section, I will first outline the phonemic inventory of Gyeli by pro-viding minimal pairs. In §2.1.2, I present realization rules, including allophonic variation. Consonant clusters are discussed in §2.1.3. §2.1.4 gives information on the phonotactics of sounds, comparing their distribution in noun and verb stems.
1There is discussion whether the latter should be viewed as voiced stops or rather as continuants
*β, *l, *ɣ, which is how they are realized in many Bantu languages today (Hyman 2003: 42).